When Richard Jef­frey Newman was three years old, the man who owned the Lee’s cloth­ing store around the cor­ner had the mar­velous idea of using Richard to model the new line of children’s jeans that Lee’s was try­ing to sell. Richard’s fam­ily thought this was a great idea and so a pho­tog­ra­pher was hired, and the shoot was sched­uled for a sunny after­noon in front of the build­ing where Richard and his fam­ily lived, but no mat­ter how much the peo­ple in atten­dance encour­aged him, Richard wouldn’t turn his young butt to the cam­era long enough for the pho­tog­ra­pher to take a pic­ture with the Lee’s label promi­nently sit­u­ated in the frame, end­ing the young boy’s mod­el­ing career before it even started. Who knows where Richard would be now, what kind of star­dom awaited him — because he thinks it makes no sense for him to imag­ine this if he isn’t going to imag­ine him­self a star — if he’d been able, back then, to stand still just a few sec­ond longer? (Stand­ing still con­tin­ues to be some­thing Richard has dif­fi­culty doing.) Cer­tainly he wouldn’t be blog­ging here, though, frankly, Richard thinks he prefers blog­ging, and teach­ing, and pub­lish­ing — he’s writ­ten a book of poems and a cou­ple of books of trans­la­tions — not to men­tion the life he lives with his wife, son and two cats (yes, that life most of all) to wher­ever a mod­el­ing career would have taken him.

Richard’s books are called The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), a book of his own poems, as well as Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan and Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan (Global Schol­arly Pub­li­ca­tions, 2004 & 2006 respec­tively), trans­la­tions of two mas­ter­pieces of 13^th cen­tury Iran­ian poetry. He also co-translated with Pro­fes­sor John Moyne all of the poetry in A Bird in the Gar­den of Angels (Mazda Pub­lish­ers, 2008), a selec­tion of work by Rumi, also from 13^th cen­tury Iran. The Teller of Tales, a trans­la­tion of part of the Shah­nameh, the Per­sian national epic, is forth­com­ing in Spring 2011 from Junc­tion Press. As an edi­tor, Richard was respon­si­ble for the spe­cial Iranian-literature  issue of the online jour­nal ArteEast Quar­terly, It Deserves and Should Com­mand Your Atten­tion.

Richard served as Per­sian Arts Festival’s first Lit­er­ary Arts Direc­tor, and he con­tin­ues to co-curate the monthly Shab-e She’r (Night of Per­sian Poetry) that Per­sian Arts Fes­ti­val holds from Sep­tem­ber through June at the Bow­ery Poetry Club. He cur­rently sits on the advi­sory boards of The Trans­la­tion Project and Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, and is listed as a speaker with the New York Coun­cil for the Human­i­ties. He is Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege in Gar­den City, New York, where he coor­di­nates the Cre­ative Writ­ing Project.

You can down­load a full press kit here. To con­tact Richard, please click here.

Call­ing Myself A Poet

I first called myself a poet dur­ing my senior year in col­lege, when I could no longer avoid the ques­tion of what I intended to do with the rest of my life. Not that any­one other than myself was pres­sur­ing me to make a deci­sion. My father was not around; my mother was happy to let me decide for myself. My grand­mother hoped I would choose a respectable pro­fes­sion that would earn me a decent liv­ing, but she was not the kind of woman who would say that plainly to my face; and there was a sec­ond or third cousin who, on the rare occa­sions that she saw me, urged me to become either a lawyer or an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, but none of them did any­thing to make me feel I had to make a deci­sion “now.” No one tried to make me feel that not hav­ing made a deci­sion yet was a sign of lazi­ness; nor did any­one sug­gest — as some of my friends had com­plained to me that their par­ents had done — that I was lost, or that I lacked the matu­rity one was sup­posed to have acquired after four years of col­lege with a grade point aver­age just a cou­ple of tenths below 4.0.

No, the only per­son who felt any urgency about what I was “going to be when I grew up” was me, but I wasn’t wor­ry­ing about it in terms of the pro­fes­sion I would enter. Rather, there were things I wanted to say, things I needed to say, and being what I wanted to be meant, I knew, say­ing them to the world. And so I remem­ber sit­ting alone one night in the cor­ner of The Rainy Night House Café in the base­ment of the stu­dent union at Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity, won­der­ing if I had the guts to write in my jour­nal what I wanted to write next. It didn’t mat­ter that I would write it for no one other than myself. I knew with a cer­tainty that fright­ened me that once I put the words I am a poet onto the page there would be no tak­ing them back. What they announced would be real to me, for me, in the way that the poems I’d been writ­ing since I was in ninth grade had been mak­ing my own life, which I often had a hard time believ­ing in, real. That real­ity ter­ri­fied me because I knew it involved a com­mit­ment to some­thing that had noth­ing to do with earn­ing a liv­ing, with my rep­u­ta­tion or with my stand­ing in the com­mu­nity, the kinds of things that peo­ple who were about to enter “the real world” were sup­posed to worry about. I knew with­out hav­ing the words to say it that declar­ing myself a poet meant mak­ing a com­mit­ment to lan­guage, to explor­ing and main­tain­ing the integrity of lan­guage, as both the only means we have of nam­ing our place in the world and as the ever-evolving envi­ron­ment of mean­ing into which we are born and that we can­not ever dis­own. I could never have said it this way at the time, but some­how I knew that once I wrote those four words, I am a poet, and I felt the click of my divided self snap­ping into whole­ness — and the fact of my fear left me no doubt that once I’d writ­ten those words I would feel that click — I would be embrac­ing not a pro­fes­sion, but a way of life, mak­ing a com­mit­ment to and for myself about what it would mean for me to live meaningfully.

I’d tried and failed to find that kind of mean­ing in reli­gion, where a monothe­is­tic god pro­vided the mea­sure, and meted out the con­se­quences, of how well I fol­lowed the guide­lines for liv­ing a good and mean­ing­ful life that he had pro­vided. It was fright­en­ing to me to con­tem­plate the loss of the cer­tainty that had been my faith in that god, and so when I imag­ined the obscu­rity that, in all like­li­hood, would be my fate as a poet, I felt, frankly, despair, because the like­li­hood of that obscu­rity was some­thing I real­ized I did not know how not to choose. I would, of course, be lying if I claimed that I never once imag­ined my poetry as bril­liant enough to earn me fame and even money, but the truth was that I cared more about a con­ver­sa­tion I had with June Jor­dan, my first poetry teacher and a writer whose work con­tin­ues to move and inspire me. June told me that a poem I had pub­lished was “impor­tant,” that it would make a dif­fer­ence in the world, that it had made a dif­fer­ence to her. We were at an awards cer­e­mony for a cre­ative writ­ing con­test that had been spon­sored by Stony Brook’s Eng­lish Depart­ment, and she told me that I should keep writ­ing, because if the poems I had in me were any­thing like that pub­lished poem, then I clearly had some­thing to say that the world needed to hear.

As I was sit­ting in The Rainy Night House Café all those years ago, I remem­bered some­thing else that June had said to me. A poem, she explained, is a vehi­cle for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It is you say­ing, or at least try­ing to say, some­thing to some­one in such a way that this some­one will be changed. There were a lot things I wanted to change when I was a senior in col­lege, about myself, about the world, and though I doubt I thought it this way con­sciously at the time, when June Jor­dan told me that what I had to say as a poet was impor­tant, poetry became the way in which I knew I would say what I wanted those changes to be. Unfor­tu­nately, I no longer have a copy of the poem that so moved June. The orig­i­nal was lost a long time ago, and the contributor’s copy I received as pay­ment for pub­li­ca­tion — I think the jour­nal was called Poem and that it came out of Huntsville, Alabama — has dis­ap­peared, and I don’t know what hap­pened to it. I wish I did. I used to read that poem when I needed to remind myself that I had believed June when she said I had some­thing impor­tant to say, even though I had no idea at the time what that “some­thing” might be.

To be per­fectly hon­est, I still don’t know if what I have to say is impor­tant to any­one but me, but I sup­pose that really doesn’t mat­ter. I have no idea how long it took me, but I finally wrote I am a poet in my jour­nal, and I felt the click I knew I would feel, and I have been writ­ing poetry ever since, with June Jordan’s def­i­n­i­tion of a poem’s pur­pose as my bottom-line. Because when I write my poems, I feel myself talk­ing to you, who­ever you are, about sex­u­al­ity and gen­der, mas­culin­ity and vio­lence, reli­gion and sex, love and his­tory – not in that order and not always in those com­bi­na­tions – and when I make my trans­la­tions, I do so because I think the writ­ers I am trans­lat­ing also have some­thing to say that it is worth your while to hear. A truly chutz­padik (auda­cious, ballsy) thing for me to say, I know. And I know I could be wrong. And I’m okay with that.